Vol. 37 No. 19 · 8 October 2015

Browse other issues from this year

Cover Artist

Beth Holgate

Browse other issues from this year

Vol. 37 No. 19 · 8 October 2015

Letters

Walker Boyd, Peter Samson, Roy McGregor, Angus Doulton, Jack Brennan, Gillian Nelson, Andrew Richardson, Rajith Dissanayake, Yannis Gourtsoyannis, Augustus Young, Andrew Darling

Neal Ascherson

London Fog: The Biography by Christine Corton. Harvard, 408 pp., £22.95, November 2015, 978 0 674 08835 1

Daniel Trilling

What to do with the people who do make it across?

Colm Tóibín

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds by Martha Feldman. California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0
Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani by Roger Freitas. Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5

Martin Monahan

Poem: ‘Costume’

Adam Smyth

‘Brief Lives’ with ‘An Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers’ by John Aubrey, edited by Kate Bennett. Oxford, 1968 pp., £250, March 2015, 978 0 19 968953 8
John Aubrey: My Own Life by Ruth Scurr. Chatto, 518 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 0 7011 7907 6

Jenny Diski

Promises aren’t always kept

Ross McKibbin

The Anti-Candidate

Dinah Birch

Another Mother’s Son by Janet Davey. Chatto, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2015, 978 1 78474 022 1

Nick Richardson

Short Cuts: Lord High Spanker

Stefan Collini

Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science by Ann Oakley. Policy, 290 pp., £13.99, November 2014, 978 1 4473 1810 1

Brian Dillon

At the Royal Academy: Ai Weiwei

Francesca Wade

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon. Hutchinson, 649 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 0 09 195894 7

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution by James Hurford. Oxford, 791 pp., £37, September 2011, 978 0 19 920787 9

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Some Tips for the Long-Distance Traveller

James Meek

Diary: Real Murderers!

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences